We launched the change. Adoption is done.
Three weeks after the launch of a new CRM system. Leadership is looking at the adoption dashboard and one of them raises says:
“Why aren’t they using it yet?”
The room goes silent for about two seconds. Then someone says the thing that always gets said:
“People are resisting the change. They don’t want to accept it.”
Everyone nods. An action is noted down – strengthen communication, add more training. The meeting moves on to the next agenda item.
But that is a lie. A small, comfortable one that everyone in that room needs so they can move on.
People are not resisting change. They are learning. And that is not the same thing.
Have you ever learned a new skill?
Driving a car.
Skiing.
Speaking a new language.
Using AI tools.
How long did it take before you could do it fluently?
Without thinking.
Without uncertainty.
Without having to consciously focus on every step each time.
Definitely not one week.
And often not even two months.
Research on habit formation shows that creating a new automatic behaviour takes, on average, 66 days, but across different people and different habits the range was from 18 to 254 days. And that is for relatively simple personal habits – not for a complex organisational change involving processes, systems, roles, emotions, and politics.
Now take something bigger.
A new life after a breakup or divorce.
How long did it take before you truly got used to it?
To a new way of living.
New daily rhythms.
The emotional and physical emptiness in your life.
These are all changes we experience in our personal lives.
Now add to those personal-life changes four systems, two reorganisations, and a new operating model at work. Over two years.
And then someone says after launch:
“Why aren’t people using it yet?”
“Why are they still asking questions?”
“Why are they going back to the old way of working?”
“But we sent them communication.”
“But the training happened.”
Because implementing a change is not the same as adopting a change.
The date tranformation goes live means that something has been launched.
Adoption means that people have changed their everyday behaviour.
And that is a completely different discipline.
What you see on the dashboard three weeks after launch is not resistance. It is the neutral zone. William Bridges described it very simply: the old way no longer applies, the new way does not yet fit.
People are functioning, but performance drops signifcantly.
They make mistakes they did not make before.
They ask questions that are already in the manual.
This is not a training failure. This is the shape of adoption.
The Satir curve says the same thing in different language: after every significant change, productivity drops before it rises.
That dip is predictable. It appears in every change model.
And then there is one more thing: people do not adopt change at the same speed.
Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory works with the idea that adoption spreads gradually through different groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Not everyone is ready at the same moment. And that is exactly why the expectation that “everyone will work in the new way from Monday” may feel managerially convenient, but it is humanly unrealistic.
The problem is not impatience. The problem is badly set expectations.
Leadership often expects change to start delivering results immediately after launch.
The new system is live.
The new structure has been announced.
The new process has been published.
The training took place.
The communication went out.
Done?
No.
That is the beginning.
The real work starts the moment people have to use the change in a real working day.
The moment they have a customer on the phone.
The moment they are behind the deadline.
The moment the new system does not work as smoothly as it did in the demo.
The moment the manager does not know how to answer the team’s questions.
The moment the old Excel sheet still looks faster than the new process.
So what should you say in that room, where leaders are staring at the dashboard in disbelief?
Five things that work better than “let’s strengthen communication”
1. Set expectations. Before launch, not after.
Leaders who hear about the adoption curve for the first time in the week productivity drops hear an excuse. Leaders who saw that curve when they approved the plan hear confirmation. That difference determines whether they will push harder or show understanding.
Ask your leaders:
“What exactly do we expect people to be doing differently 30, 60, and 90 days after launch?”
2. Plan for the dip.
When you build the expected productivity drop and the adjustment period into the plan, it stops being a surprise. Leadership, that knows the dip is coming, does not interpret it as failure. A performance drop does not have to mean the change has failed.
3. Talk about the adoption curve before you talk about the Go Live date.
The implementation date is an administrative fact. The adoption curve is the operational reality. If leadership only knows the date, they will measure success against the wrong day. The months after launch are decisive for success.
4. Set adoption metrics, not just activity metrics.
The number of people trained is not adoption.
The number of people logging into the system is not adoption.
Adoption is when people stop doing something the old way and start doing it the new way – reliably, without hand-holding, without exceptions.
Measure behaviour change.
Are people using the new process correctly?
Is the number of workarounds going down?
Do managers understand their role?
Can people make decisions using the new rules?
Are they stopping their return to the old way of working?
Is data quality improving?
Is the number of escalations decreasing?
Is the time needed to complete a task getting shorter?
5. Show where the team actually is – not where it should be.
Leadership impatience often comes from not having a good picture of reality. A weekly status that shows a dashboard and green status does not reveal adoption. It only shows the status of the team that led the change. It does not show what is happening in the rest of the organisation.
That is why you need regular feedback in the form of:
- surveys on understanding and use of the change
- conversations with managers
- input from change ambassadors
- monitoring of recurring questions
None of these five things requires a bigger budget or a longer project. They require something else: the willingness to say out loud in that room that expecting full productivity three weeks after go-live is about as realistic as expecting fluent French after three weeks of language classes.
Everyone in that room knows how long it took them to learn anything meaningful in life. And everyone in that room also signed off on a plan expecting something different from their team.
We gave ourselves years.
We gave the team a few weeks, maybe a quarter.
So the next time someone asks:
“Why haven’t people accepted it by now?”
Maybe a better question is:
“Have we created the conditions for new behaviour to genuinely emerge?”
Is your leadership impatient that people are taking time to adopt change? Send them this text. Or invite them to a team change facilitation session with me.